Lent recipes: 7 fish for 7 Fridays

Gwenn Friss

Wednesday

Mar 6, 2019 at 3:00 AMMar 8, 2019 at 5:46 PM

Millions of Catholics will give up meat for Ash Wednesday, Good Friday and the six other Fridays in Lent.

“Born and raised Roman Catholic in the Bronx, I remember I had to survive some of those tuna casseroles and frozen fish sticks on Fridays in Lent,” chef Joseph Cizynski, director of the Simoneau Culinary Arts Center at the Cultural Center of Cape Cod in South Yarmouth, says with a laugh.

Cizynski taught a class Monday demonstrating seven fish dishes for the seven Fridays of Lent. For Chatham resident Cizynski, the class began the day before at Chatham Fish and Lobster, where he talked with staff and browsed for the freshest fish he could find. From there, he decided on how to prepare each fish.

Photo Gallery: Chef Joe Cizynski teaches Lenten cooking

Asked for guidelines on cooking fish, Cizynski says, “Buy the best; treat it minimally, barely touch it. You can pan-sear, roast, poach, use it in charcuterie. But the biggest thing is overcooking. Don’t overcook it.”

Fish is very much in Cizynski’s wheelhouse. Trained at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, he was chef/owner of the French seafood restaurant Cafe du Bec Fin in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, near the New York border, until he sold it several years ago.

“Ninety percent of what we served was fish,” he says.

Monday’s two-hour Lenten cooking lesson – $65, accompanied by three wines – flew by with Cizynski demonstrating each dish and his sous chef, Tina McGrath, serving it to the dozen students sitting at a countertops with a view of the stove. An overhead stove-top camera captures the action and broadcasts it on a screen.

The all-fish dinner started with salmon rillette and ended with linguine with clam sauce. Other courses included a sauteed cod (saute means to jump as the food does when hit hits the hot pan, the chef explains,) a Basque fisherman’s stew with cubes of tuna, a salmon gravlax available to sample both cold and lightly seared (“This is going in the pan for a heartbeat,” Cizynski said. This warmed gravlax is served with caperberry sauce that uses the fruit rather than the caper bud more familiar in many dishes.

Cizynski’s teaching is like a music video – fast-paced and warm, with little mini cooking lessons sprinkled in:

* You don’t need a smoker to make gravlax: Use center-cut salmon. Add salt, pepper, sugar and dill. (See recipe below.) Salt takes out moisture from the salmon; sugar and dill go in. You leave it refrigerated in a covered pan for 36-48 hours.

* “Everybody overcooks lobster,” Cizynski says. He uses seaweed and a shallow layer of water to steam the crustacean in a large, covered pot for seven 7 minutes. Then he takes it off the heat and lets it sit one additional minute per pound of lobster weight.

“They’re having a good time, but they are learning,” Cizynski says. “I’m a nurturer. I love entertaining and teaching people. Everything is different all the time.”

Cizynski teaches three to four classes monthly (including a wide variety of cuisines and a monthly tribute to a well-known chef) but plans to teach more now that he has moved to Chatham full time. He also hosts receptions (the next one marks St. Patrick’s Day and will be held tonight at the Cultural Center of Cape Cod, www.cultural-center.org) and caters private events at the center. His daughter’s wedding reception will be held there in September. He will cook for the new couple, as he did for his other kids’ weddings.

Cizynski’s eat-and-learn lessons have a few common denominators: He invites students to call him Joe and ask questions as he works, but there’s little time for chatting until afterward.

Also, he is committed to using every edible part of the fish for basics like homemade broth with no starchy thickeners or not-so-basics like what to do with the bloodline from a tuna.

“I had a rule at my restaurant that you couldn’t throw anything out without showing me, so one day my sous chef lays this thing down next to me like some kind of snake. After a while I decided to marinate it in homemade teriyaki sauce and roast it,” he recalls. “We put it in what you would call a food processor and got salty, fishy beads that we used for an extra layer of flavor in sushi and sashimi.”

Chef Joseph Cizynski’s fish recipes for Lent, including the two he shares here, may make giving up meat a little less of a sacrifice.

Marmitako (Basque tuna and potato soup)

1 pound raw tuna, cut into 1/2 inch cubes

2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

5 tomatoes, cut in half

1 red bell pepper, chopped

3 shallots, chopped

2 cups of yellow potatoes, diced

1/2 cup EACH parsnips, zucchini and yellow squash, diced

2 garlic cloves, sliced

2 roasted habanero peppers, seeded and chopped

2 teaspoons smoked paprika

4 cups vegetable broth

Chopped Italian parsley

In a bowl, toss tuna with extra virgin olive oil and set aside.

Cut tomatoes in half and put onto cookie sheet pan and roast in a 375-degree oven until they start to brown. About 20 minutes.

In a large pot, heat 2 tablespoons of olive oil and add everything else except vegetable broth, and parsley and sweat over a low-to-medium heat for 15 minutes to soften without browning. Add stock and cook until vegetables are soft, about 7 minutes. Add roasted tomatoes. Puree mix in blender until smooth. Return to pot and season with salt and pepper. Add tuna and let sit for 3 minutes. Divide soup into 6 bowls and sprinkle with parsley and serve with warm baguette.

Gravlax of Salmon

2 (one pound) pieces of high-quality filleted salmon, skin on

1/2 cup kosher salt

1/2 cup sugar

3 tablespoons ground white pepper

2 bunches dill, roughly chopped

Cover both salmon fillets with equal portions of salt, sugar, pepper and dill.

Place 1 fillet on top of other fillet flesh sides touching. Wrap in aluminium foil and place on sheet pan. Place another sheet pan on top and put into refrigerator. Put a 5-pound weight on top of sheet pan and leave in refrigerator for 36 to 48 hours. Remove from refrigerator and take apart. Wipe salmon fillets clean and slice on an angle very thinly.